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PERTH A guide for the curi o us
PERTHA guide for the curious
I N M E M O R I A M
Fanny Balbuk
George Seddon
Geoffrey Bolton
For their contributions
to the imagination of Perth.
EDITED BY TERRI-ANN WHITE
PERTHA guide for the curious
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PERTH: A GUIDE FOR THE CURIOUS
LORD MAYOR’S FOREWORD
Perth: a guide for the curious honours our city’s richness and celebrates our diversity in 24 very personal perspectives of what Perth means. And has meant, to its people. Certain themes clearly resonate throughout – a sense of place: of where we have come from, what drives us into the future, and a love of living in such a fabulous part of our world.
Having had the honour of being Lord Mayor of Perth since 2007, my vision has been to create a vibrant capital city where ‘care’ is paramount for its citizens. A city made through progressing important projects and programs, and inspiring communities to think about their surroundings in different ways. The Council has collectively driven some major developments and changes across our City.
In recent years Perth has been enlivened by activities that encourage visiting the city and using space more effectively. With strong and continuing growth in the inner city residential population and the development of many new commercial buildings, our business and retail sectors have flourished.
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The RighT honouRable The loRd MayoR lisa-M. scaffidi
Having lived and worked in the City all my life I am so proud of having played a part in this growth at a time when people were not appreciative and, at the start, somewhat fearful of the changes that they have now been wholeheartedly embraced.
Perth is recognised as the western gateway to the nation of Australia; a city of some 2.3 million which annually ranks as one of the top ten cities in the world in The Economist’s liveability index.
The opening of Elizabeth Quay and future developments already underway, such as Perth City Link and Waterbank, are exceptional projects that are practical, inject investment into the local economy, and will attract and keep visitors making return visits to Perth.
Through good planning, learning from others, and embracing sustainability we are seeing Perth develop into a global city of substance. I could not be prouder.
I hope you will enjoy reading the contributions contained in this book, and that it inspires you to discover areas you may not yet have discovered.
The Right Honourable the Lord Mayor Lisa-M. Scaffidi
CONTENTS
FOREWORD Lord Mayor Lisa-M Scaffidi
INTRODUCTION Terri-ann White
COUNCIL HOUSE Geoffrey London
OORL NGULLUCK KOORLINY Len Collard with Angela Rooney and Clint Bracknell
MALCOLM MACKAY Perth: Growing up
KNOWING LANDSCAPES Helen Whitbread
ENDURING PERTH Kate Hislop
DAMP FEET IN PERTH Felicity Morel-Edniebrown
THE BUILDINGS OF PERTH Michal Lewi
ALTERNATE FUTURES ON THE FORESHORE Julian Bolleter
WHITE CITY Marcus Canning
PERTH VISION Peter Kennedy
PICTURING A CITY: THE EXPERIENCE OF PERTH Clarissa Ball
BRIGHT LIGHTS: LIVING IN PERTH Diana Warnock
SIDINGS Paul Carter
URBAN REFLECTIONS Geoffrey London
METAL MEN Sarah Burnside
DESPERATELY FAILING THE HOMELESS Conrad Liveris
CREATIVE DARWINISM: PRETTY FLOWERS GROW IN SHIT Nick Allbrook
PERTH CITY: LAW AND GOVERNANCE Antonio Buti
A WALK DOWN FOUR STREETS THAT DON’T EXIST Beth George
DEVELOPMENT AND PLANNING Allannah MacTiernan
PERTH: IN CONVERSATION Gillian O’Shaughnessy
PUBLIC ART IN PERTH: A PERSONAL VIEW Andra Kins
CRIMINAL PERTH David Whish-Wilson
CITY CENTRE BIG PROJECTS Craig Smith
LEAVING PERTH Ruth Morgan
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INTRODUCTION
A CITY AND HOW IT WRITES ITSELF
Perth, Western Australia, is an urbanised capital city that hasn’t produced much fiction and poetry about itself by local writers or guest observers. It has unrolled its distinctiveness largely within the constraints of formal history and anthropology. It’s hard to nominate contemporary books to visitors—in non-fiction too—that capture the contours of the streets, the urbanity (or its disavowal) lurking in laneways and intersections, those features of a city that were somewhat overlooked in the 1980s when key streets turned into one-way mazes and people stopped visiting the CBD after six at night. The way it had always been used by citizens was forgotten: going to ‘town’, by day and night, where all types of initiations and transgressions could be conducted. It become a ‘town’ that carried the traces of memories of street photographers outside grand department stores, bunches of boronia sold on the street, an ecoculture of bookshops and music stores where serious staff members could provide an education in, say, jazz music since bebop or international fiction in translation to eager customers (like me).
The 1980s boxed up these memories of what the city once was and made a less appealing version that, in various lean times, wasn’t worth bothering with as a destination. Described
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pejoratively as a knock-off version of a provincial English city—all beige and prefab shopping complexes—it looked like a town centre where civic pride may have once resided. An insult better or worse than the mantle of backwater?
What a difference decades can make. Ten years ago you could fire a rocket down many of the main CBD streets and only hit rubbish bins. I recall an epiphany in around 2011 when I walked along St George’s Terrace with sophisticates from Sydney from cocktail bar to restaurant on a Thursday evening and the streets were teeming with people. Miraculously, there was now choice, diversity, and people on the streets.
All of these streets are now reinstated to two-way and the city of Perth has lost its contentious slogan that Your car is as welcome as you are. It isn’t that I’m fixated with driving a car through the city but those one-way streets made for transit routes to get you out of the city as fast as possible. And now, after all of the enlightened decisions have been applied from those changed planning priorities, small and often artist-led interventions have made new spaces in which to eat, drink, meet and these efforts have been matched with large imagina-tive developments in key city sites that had sat neglected for decades. I am thinking of the State Treasury building complex and Brookfield Place, both of them with open access and the most heartening approach to urban renewal and beauty. After some years of a boom time in the mining and exploration industries this city has filled with new people in large numbers (in 1960 the population was 409,000; in 1980 898,000; in 2015 we were 2.02 million, and projected for 2050 we’ll be
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4.9 million). There are people in the streets and a palpable appetite for renewal. Big city traffic jams, too, for the first time.
While we have a contemporary literary cohort, following a strong twentieth century literature in Western Australia that is distinctive and vibrant and noted for its relationship with both describing and projecting landscape and place, most of this current writing follows its antecedents and looks closely and lovingly at the bush, the flat plains, the coast and its dunes and white sand and buoyant water. And its suburbs. Has Tim Winton written about Perth city? Only in passing—it has not been his focus. And Winton has been the poster boy for a sense of Western Australian place for thirty years, particularly for readers from elsewhere. He has drawn visitors to this state. What do they make of Perth, usually the first destination when flying in?
Think about the yield of writing from this state with its over-abundance of talent. Katherine Susannah Prichard. Kenneth Seaforth McKenzie. Randolph Stow. Dorothy Hewett. Joan London. Gail Jones. Kim Scott. Stephen Kinnane. Marion Campbell. Stephen Daisley. A few of my favourites. But it is only the stray poem or short story or set-piece in a novel that occupies itself with that stretch of Swan River from Heirrison Island up to Kings Park and all that sits behind it up to Newcastle Street in what was renamed Northbridge in the 1970s. For those in the know, there are other examples. Gerry Glaskin, a Perth-born author, wrote and published novels in the UK in the 1950s and 60s that tracked love affairs and other congress between men in the Perth gay scene, but he anonymized the
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street names and places and fixed it into an encoded setting that you could only recognise if you belonged to that community at a particular moment. Randolph Stow, too, chose to set his novel The Suburbs of Hell (1984), formed around the years of fear that Eric Edgar Cooke instilled here in the 1960s, in a fictional city with contours that more closely resembled his adopted city of Harwich than Perth.
I’m not sure why Perth city has been so neglected by our creative writers. I scoured the pages of the vast range of anthologies published since the 1970s and found very little. The main literary writing to have tackled the site of the CBD, the focus of this book, has been memoir and non-fiction. Novelist David Whish-Wilson rehearses much of this writing in his narrative book Perth (2014), which belongs to a series of books by writers about their Australian cities. He illuminates the way it operates as a city, and describes it successfully to readers including life-long residents. Whish-Wilson certainly provides a vivid picture of the Swan river running through the city and all the way down to the port.
The most striking image from Whish-Wilson’s book is the figure of Fanny Balbuk, trapped for some time in the writings of Daisy Bates but released in other writings—in interpreta-tion and imaginative flight—in recent decades to be her own woman again. There are a number of contemporary accounts of Noongar and other Aboriginal people in the city. Stephen Kinnane’s Shadow Lines (2004) is a standout: a portrait of care in an organised community in Perth that celebrated life and pleasure.
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The most descriptive writing about Perth city, with a menacing historical soundtrack, can be found in the immaculate memoir of place by Robert Drewe, The Shark Net (2000). His is a coming of age narrative with a teenaged Rob occupying the city in the 1960s, on the loose from the suburb of Dalkeith and, a little later, as a cadet journalist at The West Australian covering, amongst other assignments, the trial of Eric Edgar Cooke, a man he knew through associations described in the book.
Recently, at Wendy Martin’s first Perth International Arts Festival as artistic director she presented her opening event, outdoors and free, filling Langley Park with fifty or so thousand people. Two of our best writers, alongside performing artists and musicians, took to the stage and a lectern and actually read a short passage of luminous writing. As a literary colleague from Sydney said to me the week after: who’d believe such a remarkable thing? It was both surprising and deeply successful to see Kim Scott and Robert Drewe up there, unadorned aside from words on paper, as part of a joyous, honest account of how this place once was, how it was settled, and what has been made of it since then. I’m not sure I’ll recover soon from this complex, political, courageous and very beautiful shadow play offered to Western Australians about what we are made of in this corner of a tremendous continent.
Our focus here in this book is a quirky one: we asked people with expert knowledge or deep experience to write in a more informal, or personal style, about the city of Perth. To take us through it, on a walking tour of what they know about
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the city and its history. We defined the city as starting at the Causeway and following the span to Kings Park and ending at Newcastle Street to the north. We’ve provided maps, and hope both visitors and residents will enjoy this illumination of the city of Perth. Don’t forget your sunscreen!
Terri-ann White
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COUNCIL HOUSE
Geoffrey London
Council House has been justifiably celebrated as the best example of modern architecture in the city of Perth. The history of Council House, however, has been marked by two periods of controversy: the first starting well before it was designed and then, during the mid-1990s, when the building was seriously threatened with demolition.
THE SITE
The decision to conduct an architectural competition for the design of Perth’s New Town Hall, as the project was initially known, came while arguments were erupting about the site nominated for the building. The site selection controversy had bubbled along since the mayoral elections of 1901, but became more urgent and more rancorous once the project became real.1
1 After the site was finalised in the second half of 1959, the West Australian newspaper of 9
November 1960 reported:
“I am in favour of disposing of the present Town Hall site and of building a larger town hall
on a central site to be selected by ratepayers” . . .<<AU: does the West Australian quote end
here or does the entire quote go to the end of the endnote? Unclear>> This could have been a
statement from a candidate in the last Lord Mayoral elections. But it was made 59 years ago. It
was a plank in the platform of William Gordon Brookman, who was seeking election as Mayor
of Perth in 1901. Even then, only 31 years after the completion of the Perth Town Hall, a new
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The Crown Grant for the Council House site on St Georges Terrace was handed over on 21 July 1954 and the announce-ment of an Australia-wide competition for the ‘planning and design of the new Perth Town Hall’ was made public on the same date. The original plan was for a two-stage competition, with submissions due over a twelve-month period.In the years leading up to the competition there was a fierce campaign to promote the selection of an alternative site on the river’s edge. In particular, the Western Australian Chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) asserted that the new Town Hall should be located on Perth’s riverfront, taking advantage of the best setting for this long-anticipated piece of civic architecture. Before the competition was announced, the campaign gathered momentum and was given sustained exposure in the press, indicating a high level of public interest in the new structure.In the face of spirited opposition and four and a half years after the first announcement of the competition, the Perth City Council issued a press release dated 15 December 1958 in which they launched the Australia-wide competition for the ‘…new Town Hall and municipal offices to be built at a cost not exceeding one million six hundred thousand pounds’ on the St Georges Terrace site.An editorial in the West Australian newspaper followed the press release, applauding the concept of architectural competitions for important buildings:
site had become a civic issue. . . Shortly before World War I a referendum on the siting question
recorded a majority for the advocates of the present army headquarters site in Beaufort-street .
. . Premier Collier in July 1934, suggesting three sites – Government House, Stirling Gardens
and the Esplanade.
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All big buildings – particularly those which will become landmarks – should make a distinctive contribution to the city’s appearance. The only sure way of achieving this and guarding against dullness and mediocrity is to enlist the ideas of the best architects in all the schools of their profession. The imaginative conception of Sydney’s proposed opera house, which was inspired by the waters of Port Jackson, is the result of an international competition.
But a regret was noted: The architects entering for the town hall competition will be restricted by the setting for the new buildings. Even at this stage the council would do well to reconsider the proposed site of the civic group in favour of one on reclaimed land fronting the Esplanade. The building would then be uninhibited in style and would occupy a more dominant and pleasing position as a focal point of the proposed sweep of botanic features on the foreshores of Perth Water.2
Town Clerk Green, a past president of the WA chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, was resolute in his defence of the selected Town Hall site and equally resolute in arguing that there was no need to respond to the recommen-dation of the Institute. He believed that sufficient information was already available to show that the Institute’s preferred riverfront site would prove very expensive because of the depth of silt, the requirement of a further reclamation of 15 acres from the Swan River, the difficult piling conditions and, in his view, the necessity for a retaining wall on the riverfront.
2 West Australian, 19 December 1958.
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He argued that there were difficulties of access to the river site and advantages arising from a more central city location.3
The town clerk’s clear firmness of conviction later contributed very positively to the successful building of Council House. The influential English planner Sir William Holford, during a visit to Perth that coincided with the site debate, viewed the options and recommended that the Council remain with the site chosen. In his subsequent letter to the Institute, the town clerk wrote that the Council had been ‘fortified’ by the opinion of Sir William Holford. The Daily News then reported the headline: ‘TOWN HALL, FILE CLOSED’.4
THE COMPETITION
The Council’s expressed desire to have the building completed for the 1962 Empire Games in Perth, coupled with the time spent battling over the site, contributed to the decision to reduce the competition to a single stage. The appointed asses-sors, in addition to the chair, Professor Brian Lewis from The University of Melbourne, were all prominent architects: Harry Seidler, Leslie Perrot, and A E (Paddy) Clare. The decision to accept the role of assessor had provided a problematic choice for Harry Seidler, who wrote a letter to Town Clerk Green:
Your recent visit to my office placed me in quite a dilemma. The forthcoming competition promises to be a most inter-esting project in which I would have very much liked to participate as a competitor.5
3 Memorandum by Town Clerk Green to the General Purposes Committee, 9 March
1959.
4 Daily News 13/7/59
5 Perth City Council Archive File 40/59, letter dated 2 October 1959.
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The competition called for an office block and a public suite, which was to contain a main hall for 2,500 people, a lesser hall for 1,000 and a banquet hall for 1,200. The conditions of competition were bald, descriptive, and quantitative. There was no attempt to solicit a particular architectural approach or to urge any kind of representational or qualitative response. The conditions did, however, advise that the earth foundations would support a building of about 18 storeys and that the plot ratio was 5.The competition was open to all architects who were corporate members of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects and was described as a competition for the selection of an architect rather than the final design of a Town Hall. The first prize on offer was £5,000 and 61 entries were received.Professor Brian Lewis, chairman of assessors for the competi-tion, was triumphant in his description of the winning entry:
For Perth citizens, this is a milestone. It will be a magnif-icent building, giving something of grandeur to Perth and making it an even finer city. It will be the best building of its type in Australia. I congratulate Perth on this very fortunate design.6
Sections of the assessors’ report were printed in the West Australian, reinforcing the public importance of the outcome:
the awards made were unanimous and unqualified, and . . . the authors of the winning entry should be appointed as architects for the new town hall . . . The design No 19, premiated first, was immediately recognised as a direct and satisfactory solution. Detailed examination established
6 Assessors’ report
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it as being capable of development into a most dignified and efficient Town Hall.7
Design No 19 was by Jeffrey Howlett and Don Bailey, two young architects who worked together at Bates Smart and McCutcheon in Melbourne and entered the competition independently from that distinguished Modernist firm. Howlett had previously worked in Perth for a number of years after travelling there from England following the completion of his diploma at the Architectural Association. The firm of Cameron Chisholm and Nicol of Perth was awarded the second prize, and the partnership of Anthony Brand, Gus Ferguson and Bill Weedon, also of Perth, awarded the third prize. Howlett and Bailey moved to Perth from Melbourne to set up a new office and take on the appointment as architects for the new building. The third architect joining Howlett and Bailey in Perth from the Bates Smart and McCutcheon office was Lindsay Waller who described himself as the ‘nuts and bolts man.’8During 1956 and 1957, Waller had been the project architect in Perth for the construction of the Methodist Ladies College building. The winning design went through a number of changes and refinements before building began. The rather squat proposed building of 9 storeys increased in height to 11 and then to 12 storeys to allow for future expansion. Floors 8 to 10 were designed to take advantage of the views and house the reception areas for Council, including a staff cafeteria and councillors
7 West Australian, 2 September 1960
8 Interview between Lindsay Waller and the author, Perth, 10 October 1995
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banqueting room on level 10. The competition design had the columns going straight down to the ground, continuing the upper structural frame, but the design was changed at a late point to allow the opening up of the ground floor. Howlett had recognised the possibility of visually linking the St Georges Terrace entrance with the proposed Public Suite to the rear of the site. Lindsay Waller recalled how Town Clerk Green acted as the client and was prepared to make decisions on behalf of the Council. This streamlined the process considerably and, according to Waller, he made a significant contribution to the project through his receptiveness and decisiveness. In the instance of the changes to the ground floor, it was a case of Green enthusiastically agreeing with Howlett.9
Although the winning competition entry was designed as a reinforced concrete flat-plate structure, the building was converted to steel-framed, chosen as the most economical and speedy form of construction. It is unlikely that the building would have been ready for its part in the 1962 Empire Games if pre-ordered steel had not been used.Construction began on the administrative block in 1961 at a contracted cost of £1,230,000. The first pour of concrete took place under floodlights on 10 November 1961. The Public Suite, the halls at the rear, were costed at £640,000 and the decision was not to proceed immediately with their construction. After some heated debate about the acoustic qualities of circular halls, this deferral of the Public Suite eventually became abandonment, leaving Council House as
9 Interview with Lindsay Waller
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an incomplete version of the competition proposal. The Public Suite, however, was pursued in another form and, in 1968, Howlett and Bailey was commissioned by the City to design a new concert hall on a site to the east of Government House, the former Chevron-Hilton hotel site. After a popular and well-publicised ceremony at the almost completed Council House during the Empire Games at which the Duke of Edinburgh officiated, Her Majesty the Queen opened the completed building on 25 March 1963.
THE BUILDING
Council House is a slab block with eleven storeys hoisted off the ground by massive marble-clad beams and columns. The ground floor originally had a glazed foyer to the eastern side with the western side open, offering a clear vista through to the gardens behind and a visual link to what was meant to be the Public Suite. The western side was glazed in 1978 to provide a display space for the Council. The slab block plan provides a vast open office area with the service cores at the narrow eastern and western ends of the building. To the east, the core contains the four high-speed gearless lifts, the toilets, tea room, and main staircase. The escape stairs, risers, and air conditioning ducts are at the western end. The open space offers spectacular views to the north across the city, to the south across the Swan River, and to the west up to Kings Park. Council departments, together with some commercial tenants, occupied the first seven floors with the Council reception and Mayoral suites on the eighth
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floor and the Council suite on the ninth. The Council Chamber on the ninth floor is in the form of a 13-metre diameter glass cylinder with a white marble floor. The window walls comprise floor to ceiling double glazed sealed units in aluminium frames. An innovative form of testing, a ‘‘typhoon test’’, was developed for the double-glazed windows planned for Council House. At the Perth airport, firemen hosed water into the slipstream of an aeroplane engine mounted on a truck to simulate a storm with torrential rain in wind gusts of 145 km per hour. It was the first time such windows had been used in Perth and Lindsay Waller stood behind the prototype during the testing as a sign of faith in the design.10 Howlett and Bailey required all their consultants to be estab-lished in Perth so that nothing about the building was handled through remote control. The committed team effort allowed for a high degree of coordination of structure, with services, with fabric, and with finishes. Furniture was designed by the architects for the building and made in Western Australia. Specially designed door handles, taps, and smokers’ stands, all made by local artisans, were incorporated into the building. Carpet, repeating the T-motif of the external window shadings, was designed by the architects. One of the most distinctive elements of the building is the pattern of T-shaped sunshades placed uniformly against the four glazed walls of the building. According to Lindsay Waller there was only one possible dimension that would allow the Ts to go around the corner and repeat themselves. This dimen-sion was arrived at empirically and was set out by Waller after
10 Interview with Lindsay Waller
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numerous geometric experiments.11 The result is an apparently floating cage of Ts creating a continuous mat of a sunscreen which folds seamlessly around the corners of the building. They perform an additional role as fire-isolating spandrels between the floors.As sunshades, the shallow Ts cannot be regarded as highly effective. However, as a modern filigree, a crisp carapace of sparkling abstract figures, the Ts bestow on the building a civic and celebratory demeanour that emphatically lifts the building from the banality of many contemporaneous office buildings. As the building progressed, Caliban, the wry and astute critic writing in the local chapter journal of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, called Council House ‘…very sharp, very sharp indeed. If it had feet it would undoubtedly wear Italian pointeds.’12
At the time of its completion there was a widespread, almost natural assumption that the new would triumph over the old, that the modern city would take precedence over the colonial city. This view held such currency as to allow open discussion in the architectural press about the relocation of the adjacent Government House to Kings Park, or at least the demolition of the Government House ballroom, which was thought to be perilously close to the base of Council House.13 The West Australian published letters that advocated similar approaches to those found in the architectural journals, without raising any objections to the suggestions either through editorial comment or letters from others. The letter from F E McCaw of
11 Interview with Lindsay Waller
12 The Architect, Vol. 6, No. 72, June 1963, p. 48.
13 Architecture in Australia, Vol. 52, No. 4, December 1963, pp. 84–9
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Perth suggested that ‘…the “antiquated” Government House be bulldozed for the purpose of creating the best possible site for the Town Hall.’14 A J Hepburn, in speaking of the Council House site, stated that ‘Its one drawback is that it will become cramped in time, because no encroachment on to Stirling Gardens should be tolerated. But the answer to this is to get the State Government to agree that Government House can some day be demolished.’15 The proposal to demolish the buildings of the colonial past extended at one point to the neo-classical Supreme Court building to the south of Council House. This great porticoed building was to make way for a new ceremonial drive, a western continuation of the Esplanade.However, there were dissenters to those who were intoxi-cated by the modern and the new. A letter to the Daily News lamented that ‘…a little more dignity was not incorporated in the administrative block.’16 And on the following day the same newspaper published a letter whose author was in no doubt about what constituted the necessary elements of a respectable town hall:
Our proposed new Town Hall has no clock and no dome roof, both of which are essential civic building requirements.17
The New Review supported the modern forms of the winning scheme:
Those few old fashioned rate-payers who are suggesting
14 West Australian, 24 March 1959.
15 West Australian, 22 May 1959
16 Daily News, 6 September 1960.
17 Daily News, 7 September 1960.
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that the new scheme is before its time, should make a point of inspecting the City of South Perth and City of Subiaco new centres, converse with officials and citi-zens and learn, as they undoubtedly will, that these new modern structures have given their respective cities a great boost as well as meeting a very real necessity in their civic requirements and progress.18
Council House is a building that was emblematic of the young colonial city of Perth embracing with enthusiasm the prom-ises of international Modernism. From 1963 until December 1993 Council House accommodated the Perth City Council administrative offices, the Mayoral and reception suites, the Council Chamber, the Council Library, and numerous other Council facilities of a less grand nature.
THE BUILDING UNDER THREAT
However, in the early 1990s, after just 30 years of life, Council House was earmarked for demolition by the State Government, its consultants, and the City of Perth, with the neighbouring colonial buildings proposed to remain in a newly refurbished ‘Heritage Precinct’ as part of Premier Richard Court’s vision for Perth.19
The WA Chapter of the RAIA aggressively opposed the plan to demolish Council House. This may seem paradoxical after its predecessors argued equally forcefully that it not be built on its site. The issue for the RAIA moved on from that of site
18 New Review, April 1961.
19 Perth: A City for the People, brochure prepared as a summary of joint development initiatives
between the Government of Western Australia and the City of Perth, 1994. The development
proposals were prepared by consultants, Philip Cox, Etherington Coulter and Jones.
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selection and became the protection and acknowledgment of a key part of Perth’s recent past, its most celebrated modern building.The RAIA joined with CityVision, a voluntary urban advo-cacy group, and other concerned citizens to argue against the demolition. Their arguments embraced a view of heritage which recognised that heritage buildings were not only from the distant past but were being created on a daily basis as the ‘heritage of tomorrow’ and were reliant on their distinctive qualities and cultural importance. Council House clearly had such qualities, as recognised by experts external to the state and local governments.The Perth City Council commissioned Schwager Brooks and Partners Pty Ltd, the Sydney-based conservation and heritage consultants, to evaluate Council House and advise on its future. They reported that:
Council House is a valid, if contrasting, component of a rich group of 19th and 20th century public buildings, all drawn together by the surrounding gardens and parkland.
Schwager Brooks argued that Council House was appropriate in its context as it represented a civic and cultural continuity and should be retained, refurbished and entered on the West Australian Register of Heritage Places. They recognised that the building survives in a relatively intact form, both externally and internally, with few modifications having been made to the building fabric throughout its life; that it was designed to utilise the most modern technological building systems of the time; and that it was a landmark building in this respect
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in Perth and Australia.20
The Western Australian branch of the National Trust of Australia recognised that Council House survives as a fine example of office design which featured the most progressive ideas of the time, reflecting influences of the major contemporary structures in Europe and America. The building is acknowl-edged by them as having national significance in this regard. The National Trust recommendation was strong in asserting that Council House should be conserved in accordance with the recommendations of the conservation plan prepared by Schwager Brooks.In the face of this evidence the Western Australian Government and the interim Commissioners of the City of Perth publicly expressed the view that Council House should be demolished. They proposed an extension of Stirling Gardens on the site and the re-instatement of the colonial gardens surrounded by turn-of-the-century institutional buildings. While they did acknowledge that Council House has architectural merit, they argued that it should go because it did not ‘fit’ within a ‘heritage precinct’. This view suggested that the saved past is more worthy than the present. Inevitably when such a past is reflected upon it is idealised and is, more often than not, in the words of the British critic, Patrick Wright, ‘. . . the historicised image of the establishment’.21
The Council House Urban Design Assessment Report prepared by the City Planning Department in May 1994 recommended the building should not be entered on the Heritage Register.
20 Ibid, Heritage Assessment and Conservation Plan, Council House, 1993, p. 5.
21 Cited in A Heritage Handbook, edited by G Davison and C McConville, Allen & Unwin,
Sydney, 1991, p. 8.
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And the State Government Heritage Minister Graham Kierath refused to place the building on the Heritage Register, despite calls from the Heritage Council and the National Trust to do so.22 At one point in the often acrimonious debate over whether Council House should be retained, the construction of a ‘heritage look-alike’ in the place of Council House was mooted by Craig Lawrence, the Chair of the Commission then running the Perth City Council.23The term ‘heritage’ was used to advocate an historic style. This clearly demonstrated that the problem was not the fact that there was a building on the site earmarked for the colonial garden, but that it was a modern building.Council House, once willingly and proudly embraced by the public and press as a civic emblem of Perth, its optimism, its modernity, and its future, had been abused and seriously threatened. Its modernity proved to be its vulnerability, its potential undoing.
It is now history that Council House was refurbished, enjoys widespread affection, is a source of local pride, and is the subject of respectful pilgrimages by architectural aficionados from other Australian cities.
This chapter has drawn on previous research and writing by the author,
appearing in ‘Council House, Perth’ in Jennifer Taylor, Tall Buildings, Australian
Business Going Up: 1945–1970, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2001, pp. 228–239.
It was previously published by the City of Perth in a publication to celebrate
the building’s 40th anniversary entitled Council House.
22 Letter from Thomas Perrigo, CEO National Trust to the PCC CEO, 20 June 1994 and
article ‘Call for Council House review by National Trust’, The West Australian, 25 June 1994..
23 Business News, 26 May–8 June 1994, p. 4.
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